Valeant, Distancing Itself From Its Past, Will Change Its Name to Bausch Health

 

Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, the corporate whose enormous price increases on old drugs helped fuel public outrage over high drug costs, is changing its name, the corporate announced Tuesday.

The new name is going to be Bausch Health Companies, to reflect the company’s better known and more respected subsidiary, the attention care company Bausch + Lomb, which it acquired in 2013.

The company announced the change, which can become in July, as a part of its first-quarter earnings.

Joseph C. Papa, the chief executive of Valeant who took over in 2016 as a part of an attempt to show round the ailing company, said the Bausch name invokes the rich history of Bausch + Lomb, which dates to when J.J. Bausch opened his first optical goods shop in Rochester, N.Y., quite 165 years ago.

“These qualities form the inspiration of who we are today as we still build an innovative company striving to enhance the health of patients globally,” Mr. Papa said during a statement.

The name change also comes as a former Valeant executive is unproven in court in Manhattan on charges that he defrauded the corporate through hidden ties to a mail-order company that Valeant wont to get around insurers’ efforts to substitute cheap generics for the company’s expensive drugs.

Valeant was once a Wall Street favorite whose stock skyrocketed after selling investors on its brash business model of shopping for up companies, slashing costs, and rising drug prices, sometimes by thousand percent or more.

But the company’s run of success led to the autumn of 2015 amid congressional and regulatory inquiries into its drug-pricing practices and its struggles handling $30 billion of debt.

The company’s decision to vary its name recalled other companies’ efforts to revamp their reputations within the wake of the scandal, like the tobacco maker Philip Morris Co. changing its name to Altria, or ValuJet Airlines’s switch to AirTran.

Since taking up as chief executive, Mr. Papa has sought to rebuild the company’s reputation, replacing much of its top management and vowing to limit annual price increases too but 10 percent a year.

It still had about $25 billion in debt as of the top of 2017.

In addition to the name change, the Canadian company will trade under a replacement symbol, BHC, and can debut a replacement logo and website.

Valeant said Tuesday that revenue from the primary quarter of 2018 was down 5 percent, to $1.995 billion, a decrease of $114 million compared to $2.109 billion within the half-moon of 2017.

But it also raised its revenue guidance for the year.